Sir Ridley Scott’s epic sci-fi film, Blade Runner, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Thus, Nightdive Studio chose to launch Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition, a remake of the 1997 point-and-click adventure game, on Jun 23. However, the title was not well received by gamers.
Nightdive Studios is responsible for remasters of a variety of PC titles, including Quake and Doom 64. Each of these titles boasts remarkably high ratings on Steam which makes the state of Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition upon launch quite surprising.
Now, Larry Kuperman, director of business at Nightdive Studios, has come forward to shed a little light on what went wrong.
Speaking to PCGamesn.com Kuperman admitted the game was unfinished upon launch and that he chose not to change the ship date because he felt fans would appreciate the game’s release aligning with the Blade Runner film’s anniversary.
However, the game was host to many minor yet irritating issues at launch leading to poor reviews. Some of the trouble comes from Nightdive’s having to reverse engineer the game as no viable source code was available. Adding to the team’s difficulties is the fact that several QA team members were recovering from COVID-19 while the game’s lead producer, Dimitris Giannakis was in the midst of moving across the country.
“Death By a Thousand Cuts”
“I think it was more of a death by a thousand cuts,” Giannakis, said. “We had a lot of small things that were kind of upsetting people or bothering people about the game. I wouldn’t say there was any one major showstopper – we heard feedback about things like, ‘we don’t like the border that you have; can we turn that off?’ Or ‘there’s no brightness settings in the game, can we have that?'”
On July 4, Nightdive released a patch that fixed many of the game’s issues, such as progression locks and memory leaks. Thanks to the patch, Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition now has mixed reviews on Steam, with the more recent reviews being positive.
Nightdive is currently working on a second patch which as of yet has no set release date. The upcoming patch will update the UI and game menus as well as solve other problems. In related news, Nacon is developing two games based on the 80’s sci-fi films, The Terminator and Robocop.
Jack Brassell is a freelance journalist and aspiring novelist. Jack is a self-proclaimed nerd with a lifelong passion for storytelling. As an author, Jack writes mostly horror and young adult fantasy. Also an avid gamer, she works as the lead news editor at Hardcore Droid. When she isn't writing or playing games, she can often be found binge-watching Parks & Rec or The Office, proudly considering herself to be a cross between Leslie Knope and Pam Beasley.
